>> the focus of Micro Focus (that’s funny!) is more like support for some bygone venerable tech, so, SUSE was a bit unaligned to their core business

SUSE was acquired when they bought Novell, the fact that they are selling SUSE and not Novell (assuming there is still a separate Novell) would tie in with that. TBH I wasn’t aware Micro Focus still existed, I know them for Micro Focus COBOL

SuSE is doing extremely well, they were bought by Novell for $210 million back in 2004, now sold for $2.535 billion.

They currently employ around 1,400 people and they regularly contribute to the GNU/Linux and open-source community in a similar fashion to Red Hat.

SuSE can be seen as the European counterpart to Red Hat and played a major role in the formation of the exceptionally strong GNU/Linux and KDE communities in Germany.

Many people are making fun about SuSE’s individual approaches with YaST etc., which back in the nineties really did encourage and enable many novice users to run their own Linux system. Sure YaST has its shortcomings, but SuSE’s distributions as a whole were always quite reasonably put together. During all the time, SuSE was always a well-respected citizen in the community.

A part of me wants this company to pull a Darwin and create a world-class experience on top of the Linux kernel and userland, propietary or open-source. But it probably won’t happen. This needs to much money…

Long time ago (around 2000), I set up a computer classroom for my high school pupils. Beeing a free software advocate, I went to an international event asking for promotion posters to decorate the classroom. The SuSE representatives were of the most generous donators. They even gave us a complete 6.2 box, including support, although I said the OS of choice were Debian.

Can you even think of a single unique reason to use the free openSUSE over other popular Linux distros?

Zypper and YaST.

I find it the best and easiest to use package management of any open-source OS, along with the RPM back-end of course. It’s very easy to vary the dependencies according to which version of the OS you are building for when writing an RPM spec (e.g. Qt 4 vs 5 in my case), which is not so simple when building DEB packages for Ubuntu.

Plus, when you install OpenSUSE, the entire library is available for you to choose from; you don’t have to install it from the command-line afterwards. And they’re hierarchically organised into categories — Development, then C++, Python, Ruby, Qt 4, Qt 5, GTK … not just “Development” as on Debian.

I find it the best and easiest to use package management of any open-source OS, along with the RPM back-end of course. It’s very easy to vary the dependencies according to which version of the OS you are building for when writing an RPM spec (e.g. Qt 4 vs 5 in my case), which is not so simple when building DEB packages for Ubuntu.

Sshhh… You risk alienating the Debianfolk and their unsubstantiated claims of .deb being the “true” package manager of FOSSland, and you know how uppity the Debianfolk can get over inconsequential issues such as rivalries between compressed archive formats that can be losslessly converted from one to another.

Haha! I’m a long-time Debian aficionado having used it or one of its offspring for the better part of 10 years. That being said, I have also used RPM based distribution (my favorite by far was PCLinuxOS which was my daily driver for a few years and had the unmitigated gall to use Synptic as the GUI frontend.) I don’t think any one package format is superior to another in this day and age of advanced GUI package managers.

Most VC’s are nothing more that debt engines. By that I mean that they buy companies and then a couple of years later they sell and move on with most of the time, the company they leave behind is saddled with debt that is the residue from the asset stripping and cash leeching that the VC’s need to do do fund their lavish lifestyle and their next victim.

Most VC’s are nothing more that debt engines. [/q] I have the same concern. Some research, though, finds a quote from 2011 (not as recent as I’d like) regarding EQT:

[q]In its 17-year history, the private equity firm has invested in 85 businesses, which under its ownership have increased annual revenue by 12 percent on average and added staff at nearly the same rate.

Most VC’s are nothing more that debt engines. By that I mean that they buy companies and then a couple of years later they sell and move on with most of the time, the company they leave behind is saddled with debt that is the residue from the asset stripping and cash leeching that the VC’s need to do do fund their lavish lifestyle and their next victim.